We Demand
by Zagzagael
Summary: A somewhat overwrought attempt to get Beth and Daryl together in early S4 at the prison.


_...that sex speak the truth and we demand that it tell us our truth_

* * *

It wasn't about age, he didn't give a rat's ass how old she was or how much younger than him she was. But if it came to that, he was completely aware of the fact that the year he turned 21 was the very same year she was born. All squalling pink skinned, blue eyed, blonde downy haired baby girl. He could just imagine her, the beautiful golden child her momma had handed to Hershel in the hospital. That was the year he'd been in the hospital as well, having his stomach pumped twice, once for alcohol and once for a stupid dare that he didn't quite remember all the details of anymore but had something to do with ingesting cocaine-laced marijuana brownies after drinking half a bottle of Wild Turkey. Merle had brought him in the first time, finding him three days into a bender face-down in a lake of Jägermeister puke in the backyard and scared himself good when he couldn't wake him up by all the tried and true methods. The second time it was courtesy of the local P.D. who'd tasered him running screaming down the highway ripping his clothes off his own body. Both times he woke up with bruises and a sore throat and regrets that threatened to crack his shoulders as they climbed higher and higher up around his ears.

Not that anyone outside of Merle, and that was on a good day, a damn good day, would miss him if he stepped, blind drunk, out into traffic. But he knew he would miss himself. Miss being alive. He just couldn't say exactly what it was about his life that he'd be regretting so he decided it was a part of livin' he hadn't lived. Yet. That was how it came to be that the year Beth was born was the year he decided it would be his own reluctance to stand tall that cut his life short and he'd better straighten up. As much as a bent thing could be straightened. Not as much as one would think, actually. He'd been pretty well broken in half fore he'd lost most of his milk teeth. You didn't get to cry about that, though, boy. And once he determined he was going to pour steel down into his spine, the world wasn't so intent on breaking him into pieces as it had seemed to be before.

Maybe the world knew that this girl had been born, this girl that was meant for him. Maybe there was some kind of universal twanging on the line that connected him from a spot just inside of his breastbone to her.

Her eyes, her mouth, a certain sway to her hips that he knew for a fact she was ignorant of producing, it all spoke a secret language back to him, as though their bodies were tin cans strung on tight string. He wasn't sure yet if she felt it, too, but he was beginning to think she just might.

She had begun to notice him. And he noticed her noticing him and it was wearing away at the hinges in his legs and he could feel how he was going to fall to his knees in front of her. It was going to happen; it was just a matter of time, the when and the where.

And he was finding himself okay with it. The truth of it. One thing that the world turning hellbent to crazy had done for him was strip all the dishonesty of his pathetic life off his bones, flayed him clean down to the muscle and tendon. There was no more lying. About anything or anyone. And more than that, to himself. The world wouldn't stand for it. Not long anyway. So, he'd become an honest man. And he found that honesty came with a price and it cost him more than he had in his pockets, so he kept all the truths to himself, bit his tongue between his strong teeth, and made certain sure his knife was skull-piercing sharp and his arrows flying straight.

He would have had his hands cut off the ends of his arms before he'd tell anyone he was getting lonely out on his lonesome. He was grateful, after a time, to Rick. In a way, Rick was the father and brother the world should have provided him. He wasn't going soft being aware of that just slowed down a bit by knowing it. It slowed down his fists, his feet, his mouth. His anger. And he would have been destroyed if the group was lost to him. He kept his head down and his bow up and made himself aware that if he pulled more than his weight people got to live another day.

Not being able to track and find Carol's girlchild was a personal failure that he'd never forgive god, the devil, or himself for.

He hadn't known at first, when they arrived wounded and bedraggled to the Greene Farm, that Beth had been born for him.

It was watching Beth give up everything after her momma staggered out of the bowels of hell in a barn Hershel had been keeping, that brought her into his awareness. He saw her then. He wanted nothing more than to lay down in a bed and drift away himself. He didn't envy her it, though, he wanted her to have it.

There was no question in his mind that she was the most beautiful girl, woman, he had ever seen. In all of his life. There was never a single moment that he got used to her looks. Each time he saw her fresh it was a new intake of breath for him. He was surprised that every man in her vicinity weren't slack-jawed around her and he had mentioned something to Dale early on about it and the old man had just tipped his head, narrowed one eye and looked at him for a long time. He had turned and walked away, sure that the Dale was in love with the girl, too. Who wouldn't be? Once, in the prison, he had remarked on how ethereal she was, not in them words, but close and Rick had to ask him twice who it was he was referring to. And when Merle resurfaced like a bad habit, he roundabout asked him and Merle said, yeah, she's pretty, but they're all the same in the dark, ain't they. And he'd had no idea what he was talking about so he didn't even try to explain how thunderstruck her face, her hips, her slender fingers and the thin wrists made him. He was struck by her lightning. She was electrifying him. He began having to walk through the world generating a static charge that seemed to spark every time he thought of her. So, he tried to stop thinking of her so much. It was hurting him.

But pain was something he understood. It was his birthright. The anchor that kept him tethered to the world. He decided that he'd rather be hurting over her than hurting without her.

He began to sidle into her presence. Just to be near her, around her, next to her. Sometimes it was with a quietness, other times it was louder. And he'd be damned but he just could not figure a way in, more often than not he'd wind up saying something so mean spirited that her gaze would settle on him and his hackles would rise up, not to threaten her but to defend himself, protect the man skin he wore. After a while, though, her gaze became open and knowing, and she would find him slow-like whenever his mouth filter failed him and she'd look at him like she saw straight through his skin and bones and into his head. She'd look at him and he knew. He knew that she saw him.

And on the nights of the days when he knew he was see-through to her he slept best, dreams of her coming to find him in the darkest of woods, seeking him out in a white kind of dress, reaching out to hold him in her arms.

He had no knowledge of how teenaged girls run the soles of their bare feet along the knife blade edge of womanhood, tight-rope walking into experience. Of men, of the body. He could not know that Beth's arms were spread out wide as though to embrace the world, and that she was tottering out into her life.

He did know a thing or two about the wilder parts of the world, of the beasts of prey that pack outside of any human expectations. Of the welcoming dark nights in which everything was moon-illuminated and the voice became a growl that became throaty howls of moon lust and triumph. He did know how this burned, a fire, beneath the layer of his skin. He didn't know that she too was consumed by the heat of his existence. And if he had known, he would have been frightened of it. For the world had made him in the shape of the lone wolf, it was only inside the beating chambers of his heart that the Alpha wolf lay waiting for his mate.

* * *

_or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves_

* * *

So, it was that she came to him, all sloping shoulder and swaying hip. Long legs carrying her to him. And not manipulative or with selfishness. She was as hungry as he was, her mouth watering for him each and every time he was in her presence. She waited, not long by the clocks of the old world, but just the right amount of time measured by the setting sun and rising moon of the new world. She went seeking him out and she found him.

There was no long drawn out tentative space between them. She would not allow it. She knew what she wanted, felt the need of him in the center of her body, and she closed the gap, filled it with all her desire. She had no knowledge of the fear that some men carry in regards to women. She had been told most men are animals with just one single thing on their minds. And it was that one single thing that had seized her own mind. She wanted the animal inside of him. Wanted him to use his knife, open her from groin to sternum and coax the animal inside of her out. So things were reversed for them and she couldn't understand it fully but she knew that she had to have his arms around her, the weight of his body on top of her body, his lips dragging wet on her flesh. It was not a black and white knowing, it was grey and misty and full of dark beckoning shadows. And it was filling up the inside of her head, blinding her eyes, and twisting something in the middle of her body. She wanted his hands on her she just wasn't sure where.

Once she had him cornered she began to sense his hesitation. And it gave her pause. And she literally had cornered him, in the prison yard, on his watch, between two cinderblock walls, in shadows so dark that she had to use her hands to find the outline of his body, his shoulders, his neck, the sharp bending horseshoe of the underside of his jaw.

He was protesting half-heartedly and it was settling a heavy weight in her heart. She wasn't having it. Not when she was going to beg him to flay her old skin from off her bones.

"Daryl," she whispered, her mouth pressed against his cheek, pushing her hips, frantic without reason, towards his own hips but his strong hands were holding her at a distance.

"Mmmm," he had no words.

"Please. I know you want this and I want this and we can have it."

"You don't know nothing about what I want, girl, and there's so much we can't have no more."

She could feel the wind at her back, the wide open spaces in front of her. She was determined. "Fine. If I ask you for a kiss, will you?"

Her eyes were growing used to the shadows they were wrapped in, she could see him consider this. He single shoulder shrugged.

"Will I what? Kiss you? Not much for kissing."

She found his neck, her fingers spanning his throat, her thumbs on his jawline. She pressed her cheek hard against his. She hummed into his ear and he moved his head sideways, closer to her lips. She smiled and began to feel the innocence of herself harden in the fire of knowledge. She grew quiet thinking about how she had been drawn closer and closer to this man she barely knew.

"Just kissing?" he asked, all gruff voice, thumbs rubbing crazy circles into her jutting hipbones.

She smiled at him, shy now, it was her move and she needed to press forward. She twined her arms around his neck, going up on tiptoe and still he held her hips, finger splayed on her sharp bones, away from his. She closed her eyes, leaned into him and kissed him.

And something passed between them that she had never in all her life experienced. His lips opened beneath hers as though in a male gasp and she fell headlong into his mouth, down his throat, and moved through his body until she found herself standing in the circle of his arms that were frantically pulling her closer. It wasn't enough and she mewled into his mouth and turned herself so that he followed and then it was his body pushing her body back against the cornered walls and she thought she would swoon herself into a faint.

Until that moment she had not known that there was an elemental answer wrought from adding female to male. She had not known that her body was the vessel and his body that which would fill her. She had not known that her lungs, her veins, her muscles, and her bone marrow were all tinder to the fire that he carried inside of himself. She became enflamed.

In that moment she realized that she had stepped off the knife's edge and was tumbling down into the great unknown. She also knew without knowing the how that she was falling into him and that he would be the only man ever to catch her. She knew this.

She whispered something and he pulled his head back, licking out of her mouth, to listen.

"You," was all she could utter. And then, "Please. Oh, god, please Daryl." She didn't know what she was begging him for.

But she wanted him to forgive her her trespasses against him, how she had forced him into this corner, her determination to have his hands on her body and her hands on his body. And she reached down between them with both hands, wide open, and palmed the rigid maleness of him, and he groaned and pressed his forehead hard into the bow of her collarbone. And the secrets began to take root inside her, between her legs, in the beatings of her heart, the seed planted and sprouting forth beneath the loam of the earth, bursting its jacket, finding its place, breaking through the dirt and seeking out the sun.

* * *

_which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness._

* * *

He grunted, low and throaty, and took a deliberate step towards her, into her, slotting one knee between both of hers, bending his legs and using the strength of his thighs to press the entire length of himself fast against her body. Her gasping at this pressure became pleading and the sound of her needing-something-from-him filled his head with light and he closed his eyes, fireworks exploding on his retinas.

She pulled her hands free from between their bodies; where the heat of her palms had been gripping him an aching absence. But then she brought her hands up to the sides of his neck, holding him, corralling him with her long fingers touching at his nape. Her thumbs brushing in time across the big arteries there. She push pulled his face back to hers, mouths seeking mouths, tonguing deep behind one another's teeth, the press of desire so intense that neither one of them could breathe through it. He was panting.

She knew what she wanted and he knew what he was prepared to give her. But not here.

And he loathed the thought of clawing their way over one another's bodies to find completion. She had gotten herself as far as the mechanics she was familiar with and everything after that seemed as though a foreign country. They both had hesitancy in their fingertips, on their tongues.

He licked his way out of her mouth, kissing the corners of her lips, her cheekbone, her temple, then rolling their foreheads together.

"Not here," he told her, his voice all sledge-broken rock.

She did not want to be held off, rebuffed from her body's trembling desire. She did not want to be cooled down, turned away, refused. "Yes, here," she whispered.

He muttered, more sound than words, and wrapped her in his arms, pulling her away from the invitation of the wall behind her back. Straightening and standing. He rocked them into a reposing of their limbs. She became malleable bone in his embrace and after long, long moments, he relaxed his hold and she was steady on her own feet. There was a warm gapping between them.

"Daryl." "Beth." They invoked one another's names, small prayers.

"I want this," she told him. "I want to be with you."

"I ain't sayin' no. Jus' not here. And whadya mean, be with me?"

For her it was romance, red blood dripping over crimson roses. For him it was devotion, skin splitting and bone breaking. She was headlong dashing and he was hesitant responsibility. It exhausted him to think of battling her, body and mind. It exhilarated her to think of the deep waters she wanted to pull them both beneath.

He knew that time had shifted, changed, become hours that neither one of them knew how to fill any longer. The new world had yet to settle and reveal itself. He stepped back, reaching for her hands, they were already in his grip, fingers twining. Perhaps this was exactly what the world now needed. Two people overcome with desire for one another, sparking a fire between their bodies, flint and steel, light and lens, the friction generated by lust and love. They could burn the whole world down and start anew.

He took her by the hand, reached down for the crossbow, and led-pulled her stumbling beside him, out of the shadows, into the moonlight, over to the guard tower, towards the tinder.

At the bottom of the tower, he ducked through the door, waiting for her to join him so that he could push it shut. There was no privacy left.

"You scared?" he asked her not sure he wanted an answer.

"Scared?" she hesitated wondering if perhaps she was foolish for not feeling the least bit frightened. She moved up against him, arms around his waist. "I ain't scared, Daryl. Not when I'm with you."

He began climbing the stairs, her fingers hooked into his belt loop, anchoring him in her sea.

At the top, outside on the metal floor, the moon watching them through her cloudy fingers, he suddenly felt unsure. She seemed to sense his reluctance and smiled at him, kind and assured, more the girl he recognized here than the girl she had been down in the yard, in the darkened corner. His heart lightened.

There was no bed, the floor cold, no comfort other than what they could offer one another. He began to kiss her again, wanting to be heated to boiling, and she pulled him backwards against the inner wall. His hands went flat-palmed beside her head and with no warning she dropped to her knees, making quick work of his belt and the fly of his worn trousers and they fell to his ankles while she took him in both hands and then into her mouth.

He groaned aloud and knew then what Merle had once told him was true, younger women give better head because it's what they're practiced at. It's what they _do_. She was licking long hot stripes up one side and down the other of his cock, taking him in, and he still was supporting himself with his hands on the wall, looking down between his elbows at the blonde head.

He was not going to last. It had literally been years for him. Years, he marveled to himself. And he reached down, hauling her by the underarms gently back to her feet, and then gentleness became a memory they could visit later at their leisure. He had his hands on her zipper, and her hands over under between his hands, pushing the jeans off her wriggling hips.

"Boots," she told him. And he hunkered down, tugging each off her foot, then pulling the jeans down and flinging them to the side. He kissed his way back up the inside of her thigh, but she would not let him bury his face between her legs and he stood up, one hand under each knee.

She could feel how strong he was as his hands cupped her ass, holding her against the wall, and this show of strength, for some reason, stole all the breath out of her lungs and her head swam with dizziness. This was going to happen. It was going to happen.

Her thighs were pressing down on the jutting edges of his hipbones, his head in the bending of her neck, he reached down and fisted his cock and guided himself into her body, thrusting upwards with huge deliberate motions of his knees. And her head went back against the wall so hard he thought Walkers could hear the resounding metallic echo for miles.

He began to move. She was calling his name in staccato bursts of breath and he could only answer with her own name. He squeezed his eyes shut and found her mouth, they silenced one another with their tongues and lips and teeth.

Their spines arched like bridges spanning, their arms reaching for one another, suspended above the rotting earth, holding fast, igniting all the dried parts of them, and drenching the flames to red coaled embers. Feeding the taste of cum and ash into each other's mouths with fingers dipping into the place where they were burning.


End file.
